Have we gone there yet? Oh yeah, we went there with the Pulse shooting in 2016. Well, let’s go there again, just for shits and grins.

No, I shouldn’t joke. This is a deadly serious issue. Deadly. And the NRA seems so powerful that sometimes I just want to bomb the shit out of their offices. (Isn’t that hilarious? A gun control person wanting to bomb the NRA?) But that would probably create martyrs for the Second Amendment cause, and I definitely don’t want the NRA attaining any sort of sympathetic status.

But in terms of the issue at hand, there isn’t much difference between the Parkland shooting and the Pulse shooting. So if you haven’t read the post I just pinged back to, please go ahead and read it, because there isn’t much from that post that I will repeat here (no sense in wasting anyone’s time, is there?). I mean, the people who got shot were obviously different — high school kids instead of gay people. And the gay community didn’t seem (to me; if you know differently, please let me know in the comments) to mobilize quite as quickly as the kids from Parkland.

But this much does bear repeating:

These shootings happen TOO DAMN OFTEN. We aren’t doing our best yet. WE NEED TO TRY HARDER. (And yes, I meant to yell.)

But I said we were going to talk about Ma’at too, and I haven’t forgotten either the concept or the deity, although they are kind of the same thing. Ma’at is the concept of divine order, justice, the way things are meant to be, as opposed to isfet, which represents chaos, evil, injustice.

While we’re on the subject of Ma’at, I want to mention the excellent page I got the above image from on Wikipedia. I liked the idea that the writer(s) of this entry included the 42 Negative Confessions in the entry on Ma’at. The Negative Confessions are what you say during your judgment, in order that you will attain the Field of Reeds in the afterlife. There are a few I’d like to highlight for you:

• I have not uttered lies.
• I have made none to weep.
• I am not a man of deceit.
• I have slandered [no man].
• I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.
• I am not a stirrer up of strife (or a disturber of the peace).
• I have wronged none, I have done no evil.

How many of these things do you think, for instance, Wayne LaPierre (or anyone in the National Rifle Association) can say truthfully?

“I have made none to weep”? What about all those grieving parents?

“I have slandered [no man]”? They are sure slandering those kids.

“I am not a stirrer up of strife”? THEY WANT NO GUN RESTRICTIONS, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!! They are doing NOTHING BUT stirring up strife! And anyone who even SUGGESTS that we do anything REMOTELY CLOSE to commonsense gun legislation is a tool of those “evil liberal elites.”

But that’s okay, the gods are watching closely, and these people will face their judgment eventually. And their hearts will be eaten by Ammut the devourer (the creature in the lower right corner of the image) and they will cease to exist.

This should go without saying, but kids getting shot is NOT part of ma’at. Which is why I’ll be marching in Tallahassee, Florida on March 24th, in the local March for Our Lives. I hope you’ll follow my lead, and help make sure that the Parkland kids are right when they say that this is the last mass shooting in this country.

Thoughts? Go ahead – lay ’em on me, but as always, keep it civil, okay?